Work Management

Digitize and automate manual tasks

Manual or paper-based processes exist for two reasons: the core ERP is too inflexible, or IT is too busy to meet the business’s operational demands. But failing to automate manual tasks translates directly into quality and safety issues, inefficient work execution, important tasks falling through the cracks, cyber security exposures, missed opportunities for gaining insights through trends and analytics — and, most of all, unnecessary costs.

With an efficient process automation capability, smart organizations can automate most — if not all — of their work. This ensures the right tasks are routed to the right persons or teams at the right time, management is kept aware in real time of worrisome trends or events, and inefficiencies and bottlenecks are identified and resolved.

Engage the workforce

Too many organizations put up with software developed in the 80s and 90s, before the advent of user-centric design, flexible datastores, in-memory analytics, and mobility. IT’s hands are tied in an endless cycle of server maintenance and ERP upgrades, which offer nothing but incremental advances to fundamentally dated architectures. This status quo leads to wide user dissatisfaction, to the point where workers often mistrust technology investments as just another exercise in overhead that makes their jobs harder to perform.

Organizations that want to change this perception adopt software that puts the user at the forefront. From mobile-first experiences, to user-definable reports and alerts, to something as simple as naming data fields what everybody calls them instead of what the vendor decided thirty years ago was best practice, engaging users is a hallmark of modern software.

Gather critical data

Easy configuration of mobile apps and data entry forms ensures that critical operational data doesn’t go uncollected. Whether workers are executing a computer based procedure or filling out a work order, the ability to capture both unstructured data — such as voice transcription, pictures, and videos — and structured data — like meter readings and environmental conditions — means that organizations have the raw materials needed to produce powerful insights. Because the first step in data mining is making sure you have data to mine.

Continuously improve

The single biggest benefit to a closed-loop platform that allows organizations to both execute processes and measure those processes’ effectiveness is that it gives those organizations the ability to continuously improve. It’s no longer necessary to make multiple different investments for performing work and then analyzing the results of that work, when both can be done in the same system.

Whether or not they’re aware that that’s what they’re doing, continuous improvement is at the core of every optimally functioning organization. The only good decisions are data-driven decisions.